The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month
The article discusses the challenges of app review in the Apple App Store, drawing parallels to Fred Brooks's observations in software project management. It argues that simply increasing the number of reviewers will not effectively address the issues of app curation and quality control. The author highlights statistics on app submissions and rejections, questioning the effectiveness of the current review process.
- ▪Apple's App Review team evaluated over 9.1 million app submissions in 2025.
- ▪More than 2 million app submissions were rejected in 2025 for various reasons, including privacy violations.
- ▪The volume of app submissions increased from 130K weekly in 2024 to 175K weekly in 2025.
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Record
| Original publisher | Lapcatsoftware |
| Canonical URL | https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/5/4.html |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 04:43:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T05:07:24.929Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T05:07:24.929Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | dNMLozOwyULw |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Previous: Mac App Store: What’s in a name? Articles index Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon) The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month May 22 2026 The Mythical Man-Month is a book by Fred Brooks about software project management. The book has become famous in the industry, along with an observation from the book known as Brooks’s law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review, the continual appearance of countless scams in the App Store, is to suggest that Apple hire more reviewers. My contention is that adding reviewers is not a solution to the problem of App Store curation, and the belief in such a solution is a myth.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lapcatsoftware.
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